Concepts of Culture
A big obstacle to studying “culture” is this: the word is associated with a usually large number of distinct but related concepts. Here are five concepts directly associated with the word “culture”.
1. High Culture - This refers to museums and fine arts like literature, ballet, opera, classical music, etc. These are impractical symbolic activities, which also tend to be old. They give very high prestige to associated people. They, are often funded by governments, to happen in central locations that people travel to visit, especially with children. Just associating with these arts makes one “cultured”, which is prestigious.
2. Arts & Entertainment - This is all impractical symbolic activities focused on relatively prestigious “performers” who larger audiences enjoy associating with, for “fun”, whatever that means. The themes of such performances tend to emphasize groups and their markers. They also tend to be emotional and to emphasize status, norms, values, and morals.
3. Group Markers - This is everything that noticeably associates individuals with particular long-lived groups. It includes their food, language, fashion, clothes, festivals, holidays, and interior decoration. Extra weight is given to distinguishing attitudes, beliefs, norms, and values. Conformity pressures often enforce members to match their group’s markers.
4. Customs & Tradition - These are long-lived practices, usually learned at early ages, and inherited from ancestors, usually without much of an understanding of why they are good practices. Explanations of why you did something will usually end here with “because it’s traditional”.
5. Social Influence - This is all influences on durable widespread behaviors that come via info from other people, as opposed to from internal DNA, environmental constraints, and other factors. This is the concept used in formal theories of “cultural evolution”.
Here are some other concepts that are closely related, but aren’t usually given the name “culture”:
6. Equilibrium Selectors - In game theory terms, behavior is determined by preferences, info, action options, a general game theory, and “selectors” that picks out which of many possible equilibria players actually play. These selectors are hard to see or understand in game theory terms, but we still know that they must exist. Norms and conformity both work via such selectors; with different selectors you get different or no norms and conformity. I once suggested this as the key “culture” concept.
7. Prestige - Cultural evolution, humanity’s superpower, doesn’t work if people just copy behaviors of random others. Its earliest versions probably focused on just copying behaviors of prestigious others. Prestigious art seems especially potent and influencing emotions and associated norms.
8. Groups - Humans bind together into groups. We try to signal the groups to which we each belong, and we try to infer the groups of others. So groups try to have features that distinguish them, and they pressure members to conform to such features.
9. Norms - Norms, including status markers, are a key way that humans coordinate. They tend to promote values, and are often accompanied by strong emotions.. As different norms correspond to different game theory equilibria, they can’t be easily varied at an individual level. But different groups can more easily have different norms, and be subject to at least weak forms of “group selection” for such shared group features.
10. Illegible Sacred - Key themes of the sacred are that it is highly valued, felt not calculated, and set apart. Humans have often treated as relatively sacred the “mysterious” illegible but important parts of key systems, like the causes behind the weather, eclipses, or earthquakes in nature. We have similar attitudes toward illegible but important causes behind social phenomena. For example, regarding equilibrium selectors, the intangible capital of firms, and the hard to see differences that make some nations richer than others.
To make sense of all this, I suggest that we seek a “cluster concept” by assuming that at some level humans understand the basic nature of cultural evolution, and the aspects of it that make it especially important and powerful. So we understand that culture works via social influence, that it relies especially on prestige, and that it is especially important re norms and groups, both of which arise from equilibrium selectors.
So while in a weak sense all that is social influenced is “culture”, for stronger more central examples of “culture” we look for the subset of such things we see as more durable, prestigious, illegible, sacred, artistic,, emotional, groupy, and normy. We see high culture is nearly max by these criteria, and arts & entertainment more generally as nearly as high.
Culture, as I see it, describes behavior and thought patterns that are neither products of individual decision-making nor biological determinism. Cultural artifacts are referred to as culture by synecdoche, but are not culture per se; their interpretations and function in society are culture. When only the artifacts remain, but the people are forgotten by history, such as is the case of prehistoric cave paintings, the cultural value of the artifacts is lost.
People who are highly individualistic, perhaps because they're embedded in highly individualistic cultures, tend to resist culture as an explanation for behavior and thought, and have less interest in cultural practices and artifacts. By contrast, people who are embedded in more collectivist cultures are more apt to see culture as a default explanation, and an important matrix of variables to tinker with.
Theorists of culture may be interested in the phrase and concept from hip-hop culture, "Do it for the culture." Broadly, the phrase means to behave in a spectacular way so as to catalyze imitators and drive cultural change. See this video for more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dbLCpAXhCI
Hip-hop, which is largely considered Black American, but which has considerable influence from the broader African diaspora and other immigrant communities like Jewish New Yorkers, has become a major global vector of cultural evolution, perhaps in part because it has a self-referential attitude about cultural evolution. Indeed, one could easily criticize hip-hop culture for being so obsessed with novelty and transgression that it's on an ever-increasing escalator towards lower and lower forms of attention-grabbing depravity.
Odd. You gave all the definitions except the one that I use. “Culture involves socially transmitted information or traits such as knowledge, beliefs, norms, skills and the artifacts created and transmitted via said traits.”